James McDonald

I've just virtualized a windows XP workstation using VMWare Convertor and thought as a final pre wipe and rebuild excercise I would take a Ghost Image of the physical workstation. I have a Ghost.iso file with Windows PE and Ghost on it and I was trying to transfer it...

Today I booted up a box and it's DHCP assigend IP Address had moved so I had to find it again using this helpful Use nmap to scan for ssh servers blog post. After downloading the command line nmap for Windows from http://nmap.org/download.html. I ran: # locate ssh...

Was working from memory today and found that proxycfg.exe doesn't exist in Windows 7 and it's been replaced by netsh. You can do it all from the netsh command line but it's quite easy to first set it up under your Internet Options and then Import the settings as...

I am using rsnapshot to make hourly, daily and weekly snapshots of my home workstation data. This is on Fedora 16. In /etc/rsnapshot.conf there are two commands that specify the root directory you want to create your backups in and whether or not to create it if it...

This is really basic but well hey, spinning shiney things intrigue me. rdesktop -f -r printer:HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a909n 192.168.22.5 Basically the above says connect to the remote desktop on 192.168.22.5 and go full screen, make the local...

Here is a well laid out explanation of how to do it: http://blog.philippklaus.de/2011/11/install-nx-server-neatx-on-ubuntu-11-10/ I am a bit disappointed with the result though. I don't seem to be able to connect and disconnect cleanly. The neatx server leaves...

Recently I have got caught out by leaving a terminal running while remotely connected to a Linux server and the connection has failed leaving the remote process unfinished & terminated. The Linux screen command allows you to run programs and disconnect. Rather than...

Telstra provides a costly service. There isn't enough competition to get the prices down especially in a regional area. They do have the best coverage on the mobile network though and it would be unfair not to mention our low population and enormous cabling distances...

I'm trying to open an xlsx document in Windows 7 Pro 32bit with Office 2003 SBE and the latest Office Compatibility Pack and it doesn't recognize the xlsx file. I have found the problem/s: The immediate problem: The version of Office 2003 didn't have Service Pack 3...

Just got this error when running vmware convertor on Windows 7 to transfer an XP image to ESXi 4. Looks like VMWare Convertor can't find the files. Opening the Virtual PC's settings and you find that it is referencing a `Parent Disk'. Copy the this file to the same...

I want to schedule a defrag for every day at 5:30PM. This is on an old Windows XP Pro laptop. I can never remember what the abbreviations used to denote the names of the weekdays are for the `at' command so here is an example: at 18:30 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su...

At work I have a range of admin tools that I install on every new workstation that I get and after 10 and more years of clicking next and watching progress bars I think I would like to reduce the number of times I have to install stuff. It's counter productive to...

Saturday very early in the morning we had a electricity substation blow nearby. It caused a power outage not only at my home but 6kms away at work. The outage was for long enough that the UPS's didn't hold the servers up, and some of them didn't come up again cleanly....

If you are after an easy to use 2D CAD program for Windows / Linux. Try QCAD from http://www.ribbonsoft.com. Currently at version 2.2.x but a newer version QCAD 3 is in release candidate phase. At under 100$ AUD for a license it's good value. And with modest CAD...

After the last updates on Fedora 16 (x64) I have been suffering from really bad screen flicker. My PC has these specs. Specifically a "ASUS GeForce GTS 450 Direct CU Overclocked 1GB" Graphics card driving a BenQ T2200HD. The symptoms are that when I alt+tabbed between...